Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich

ENDKAMPF

Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death

of the Third Reich

STEPHEN G. FRITZ

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2004 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

www.kentuckypress.com

05 06 07 08 5 4 3 2

Maps by Julia Swanson

Every effort has been made to acquire permission to reproduce the illustrations in this book.

Any error or omission brought to the author’s attention will be corrected.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fritz, Stephen G., 1949-Endkampf: soldiers, civilians, and the death of the Third Reich / Stephen G. Fritz.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8131-2325-9 (alk. paper)

1. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Germany—Franconia.

2. World War, 1939-1945—Social aspects—Germany. 3. Franconia

(Germany)—History—20th century. I. Title.

D757.9.F68F75 2004

940.53’433—dc22

2004010763

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Abbreviations and Foreign Terms

Comparative Ranks

Preface

1. Waiting for the End

2. Fearful Are the Convulsions of Defeat

3. Death Throes

4. Through the Steigerwald

5. Running Amok against the Reality of Defeat

6. Across the Frankenhöhe

7. Struggle until Five after Twelve

8. There Can Be No Return to Normality

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1. Alpenfestung

Map 2. Königshofen/Tauber River

Map 3. Middle Franconia

Map 4. Terror in Franconia

Map 5. Across the Frankenhöhe

Map 6. Across the Danube

Map 7. Bavaria

ABBREVIATIONS AND FOREIGN TERMS

COMPARATIVE RANKS

PREFACE

In assessing the dissolution of Hitler’s regime, the prominent German historian Hans Mommsen has claimed that from 1943 on, the Third Reich was in an accelerating process of internal dissolution, a situation that prompted the most radical members of the party, state, and military increasingly to assert control and assume new tasks. Further, Mommsen contends that in the last year of the war the Nazi Party embraced an allencompassing ideological mobilization, returning to the revolutionary ambitions of the Kampfzeit, the period of struggle leading to power. As part of this marshaling of support, the key goal was to cultivate a fanatical will to hold on and to demonstrate that the Volksgemeinschaft (national community) possessed a massed will to action. To Mommsen, the breakdown of the state opened for ardent Nazis the possibility of a revival of notions of a revolutionary makeover of German society, which not only required the total mobilization of the people but also mass terror directed against any recalcitrant members of the national community.¹

As Mommsen noted, in Adolf Hitler’s last official proclamation, dated February 24, 1945, he stressed our unshakeable will to fight on, evoking a vision of protracted struggle on German soil, one in which the western Allies in particular would tire of fighting a desperate foe determined to defend every village and house to the last man. If defeat could not be averted, Hitler, Goebbels, and other top Nazis seemed intent on securing the victory of the National Socialist idea in the future. As part of this endeavor Goebbels struggled to create an effective Werwolf (Nazi guerrilla) movement, both to promote guerrilla war as well as guarantee the survival of Nazi ideology. Efforts to raise a people’s militia, the Volkssturm (people’s storm), and the establishment of training camps where Hitler Youth would be indoctrinated to fight on for Nazi ideology, even after Allied occupation, were also indicative of this attempt to arouse fanatic zeal among the people. We know that the idea lives on, Goebbels asserted, even if all its bearers have fallen.²

Curt Riess, a journalist with the New York Times, noted that same February 1945 that this invocation of self-sacrifice, so reminiscent of Wagner, seemed to be succeeding in making the Germans believe that even defeat and death can be—no, indeed are—something desirable and great. This Todesverlangen (longing for death), Riess claimed, had always played a key role in German art, literature, and music, so what Goebbels wants is nothing but to make the Germans feel that the world’s end has come with the German defeat and that their death, therefore, is a fate full of meaning. Mommsen himself conceded that the extent to which this strenuous mobilization campaign took hold among the general populace was difficult to assess, although there is little doubt that the effort succeeded in prolonging the war.³ Despite the descending chaos, the energy and dynamism imparted by the party and its agents stabilized the Nazi system and enabled it to resist the desire of many citizens for an end to the war. Thus, in a cruel irony, the accelerating process of self-destruction actually served to create a certain coherence that aided the maintenance of the Nazi system and made it incapable of ending a lost war.

Whether intentional or not, Mommsen’s claims mirror the basic ideas of chaos and catastrophe theory. Originally developed to explain phenomena in the natural world, these notions have increasingly been applied to human society. According to these hypotheses, a system in a state of turbulence and disorder is unpredictable, but out of this seeming chaos can come patterns, coherence, and a temporarily stable yet dynamic structure. Since chaos can manifest itself in either form or function, an unstable system by definition is one in the process of going from being to becoming. Catastrophe can result from this chaos, especially when a system bifurcates, or branches. Yet even in this advanced state of disarray a pattern, a coherence, stable vigorous structures, and an explosion of energy can emerge. The energy flowing through the system thus produces a self-organizing, self-maintaining, dynamic structure on the edge of chaos where, ironically, systems perform at their greatest potential. Even as it disintegrates, then, a system can organize itself to a higher level of complexity and dynamism.⁴

Finding the order in something is, of course, a necessity for historians, but order is subtle because it is context dependent. That is, the researcher must understand all the complexities of a system to gain a meaningful appreciation of it. Chaotic disorder can erupt in extreme agitation, the result of which is often randomness. Such a system would display aberrant, illogical behavior, but can also produce stability and coherence before an eventual explosion. The more complex a system is, the more numerous are the disturbances that threaten its stability, and therefore the greater the energy necessary to maintain its coherence. Complicating analysis, unstable or aperiodic systems (such as human civilizations) display complex behavior that makes predictions difficult, if not impossible. When such systems are stressed beyond certain limits, sudden outbursts of chaos take place, characterized by aberrant behavior. Human decision making, for example, has the unmistakable imprint of chaos on it. One factor that aids in decision making, though, is one’s belief system. In deep chaos an element that helps determine a course of action is the historical dimension, a memory of a past event that took place at a critical moment and that will affect decision making, such as Hitler’s determination at the end of World War II not to have another November 1918. Order, of course, suggests symmetry, that one part of the pattern is sufficient to reconstruct the whole. Disorder also contains symmetry, in the sense that all possible transitions or movements are equally possible. Thus, it is difficult to analyze a system in decomposition, since different parts of the complex behave differently, although there is a tendency to react to disturbances by returning to a stable cycle that was active when the disturbance occurred.⁵

In the sense of a system in a state of disintegration that nonetheless continued to radiate an aura of control and seemed to have the situation in hand, chaos theory seems a good explanatory model for the Nazi regime at the end of World War II. As Herfried Münkler has emphasized, despite the continually invoked image of a Götterdämmerung, of a societal breakdown accompanied by catastrophic violence and disorder, the collapse of the Nazi system, coming at the end of a long and ruinous war, resembled more a slow process of deterioration than a sudden, shattering burst of light and fury.⁶ Indeed, despite the evidence of defeat all around, average Germans, both military and civilian, continued obstinately to play their assigned role. The years of extreme exertion had clearly exhausted most Germans, yet hope still flickered in some that one last effort to stabilize the military fronts might result in some sort of political solution or perhaps allow time for the appearance of powerful miracle weapons. In evident confirmation of Mommsen’s assertion, the energy imparted by a few managed to trump the lethargy of the many, and allowed the Nazi regime to remain a threat both to its citizens and to the enemy now on German soil. Indeed, the very uncertainty and chaotic nature of the situation at the local level aided those fanatics determined to resist, for, lacking any clear course of action, rank-and-file Germans tended to go along with directives from above.

This study owes much to the intersection of two developments: despite the persistently high levels of interest in World War II, there have been amazingly few studies of the final days and weeks of the war, especially on the western front; in addition, over the past decade or two, there has been a growing interest in investigating the impact of National Socialism at the local and regional level. As Münkler has stressed, this perspective allows one to get past the propagandistic images of grand rallies and popular adulation to the normality and banality of the system at the grassroots level, which, after all, was the fundament on which the Nazi regime was erected. Without the efforts of the spear carriers at the local level, who readily carried out the orders from above, the system could hardly have functioned.⁷

As with any local or regional study, there are a series of problems and questions: How did this process of disintegration play out? How much did the actions and events at the end of the war owe to ideology, and how much to a mere clinging to power by Nazi officials? How much did the constantly invoked Nazi image of a Volksgemeinschaft contribute to the stubborn, persistent German resistance long after any hope for victory remained? What role did ideological fanaticism play in the Wehrmacht (armed forces)? What was the relationship between people, party, and army? Did the majority of civilians desire a rapid end to the war, or were they willing, however apathetically and sullenly, to do their duty and carry out Nazi decrees? Had most Germans silently rejected Nazi ideology even before the collapse of the regime? Moreover, what of the issue of victimization: to what extent could German civilians be seen as victims of their own government? To most, the war’s end precipitated a sudden awareness of all that had been lost under the Nazis: lives, property, health, personal freedom and autonomy, honor, national reputation. To what extent, though, did this cause average Germans to turn away from the system? Did the loss of so much of value disgust and disillusion ordinary citizens, or did it cause them to cling stubbornly to Nazism, because otherwise the senselessness and futility of their actions would overwhelm them?⁸

This, then, is an attempt to illustrate and understand the attitudes, expectations, actions, and motives of those at the sharp end of war in April and May 1945, and in the chaotic months that followed. The goal is not to give a complete depiction of all the events in the Franconian area of Bavaria, which in any case would be impossible, but to achieve a representative and plausible portrait of the collapse of a society, and how it affected those involved, whether soldiers or civilians, victors or losers, perpetrators or victims. Ironies abounded, not least that in April 1945, in the most German of regions, a key question for German civilians was, were the Americans the enemy or liberator?⁹ Another important issue concerned the notion of civil courage. How was it acquired? Why did some choose to resist the senseless Nazi mania for destruction at the end of the war, while others willingly obeyed the Nazis, even when they knew their actions were illegal and immoral, in addition to being pointless?

Most Germans did not experience the end of the war as liberation, at least as commonly thought by the term. But they were liberated in another sense. For them, it meant the end of the illusion of German hegemony. The end of the war witnessed a societal collapse whose consequences were a struggle for survival, a subsistence economy, occupation, and waves of refugees and displaced persons to absorb. Another important point to emerge was the limited leeway for individual decision and action: for German civilians and soldiers by the threat of flying courts-martial, for foreign forced laborers by the reality of terror directed at them, for the average American soldier by the decision of too many Germans to engage in senseless resistance.¹⁰ Still, although their freedom of action was constrained, neither the German civilian population nor the postwar refugees consisted simply of passive victims caught between two fronts, for throughout the region people pressured local authorities to end the senseless resistance, or sought revenge for their tribulations in the liberation that followed. Not all the events of these terrible days can be satisfactorily explained, involving as they did a perplexing mix of military and ideological compulsion, contempt for life, self-assertion, desire for survival, fear, confusion, and anxiety, but out of the chaos perhaps some historical understanding will emerge.

In writing this book, I have benefitted greatly from the efforts of many people. I would like to extend thanks, both for their suggestions for improvement and their encouragement, to numerous colleagues with whom I have had conversations over the past few years at various historical conferences, as well as to the anonymous readers who read part of this study, which appeared as an article in War and Society. The late owner and editor of the Windsheimer Zeitung, Herr Heinrich Delp, provided a significant stimulus to this project both by opening the archives of his newspaper to me and by talking openly and honestly about the many controversial events in and around Bad Windsheim at the end of the war. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Herr Christoph Rückert, Herr Michael Schlosser of the Stadtarchiv Bad Windsheim, and Herr Kurt Güner of the Fränkische Landeszeitung for their assistance and generosity. I have profited enormously from the support of my colleagues Dr. Ronnie Day and Dr. Colin Baxter, with whom I have had countless conversations concerning various aspects of World War II, from the problems of researching day-to-day military events to the question of relating local events to the larger context. I would also like to thank Nikki Lindsey, a former graduate student at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) now in the Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois, for aiding me in my research and for posing stimulating questions that forced me to think more carefully about this project. Professor Christa Hungate in the Department of Foreign Languages at ETSU has been a valued and trusted friend to me and my family; she has generously given of her time and self to aid in my research, especially in Germany. The Research Development Committee at ETSU provided grants that aided my research in Germany and at the U.S. National Archives. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the outstanding Interlibrary Loan Service at ETSU’s Sherrod Library, and its director, Kelly Hensley, who has been a model of professional service and assistance. To all of these people, as well as those at the various archives who assisted me, I offer my sincere thanks and appreciation. Their efforts on my behalf have provided me a lesson in the meaning of professionalism and collegiality. The faults in this book are mine alone.

In Love Song, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of the mystical affinity between two people in love: Everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin’s bow, which draws one music out of two separate strings. This expresses far better than I ever could my feelings toward my wife, Julia, who once again gave me the support and encouragement needed to complete this project. Moreover, in addition to all of her other activities, she somehow found the time and energy to create the maps used in this book. I can truly say that without her this book could never have been completed. My wonderful daughter, Kelsey, with her lively imagination, creativity, and love of learning, has been a continual joy and inspiration to me. I have learned more from her in the past decade than I can ever hope to teach her. Both of them have enriched my life beyond measure, and to them this book is lovingly dedicated.

1

WAITING FOR THE END

With German forces reeling back to the Reich in disarray following the hammer blows of the Normandy and Southern France campaigns, the end of the war in Europe seemed tantalizingly near in autumn 1944. Readers of the New York Times thus might be forgiven if, on November 12, they read with skepticism two items that suggested otherwise. In an article entitled The Nazis Still Hope for a Miracle, George Axelsson, the paper’s correspondent in Stockholm, noted that the Nazi leadership understood they could no longer win the war. While Axelsson had hinted in an earlier article that the Nazis might conduct a guerrilla war from the Bavarian Alps, he now stressed their determination to prolong the fighting in order to inflict maximum casualties on their enemies, as well as in the hope of splitting the unnatural Allied coalition. Despite the looming chaos and massive destruction visited on Germany, it could thus be expected that the Germans would continue to fight doggedly, trusting in yet another of Hitler’s miracles to save them. The other piece, Hitler’s Hideaway by London correspondent Harry Vosser, seemed to hint at what that miracle might be. Emphasizing that the Eagle’s Nest, the Führer’s retreat near Berchtesgaden, lay in a virtually impregnable area, Vosser underscored the probability of protracted guerrilla resistance by elite Schutzstaffel (SS) fanatics. Not only had the area been cleared of civilian inhabitants, he claimed, but an elaborate series of tunnels and storage areas for food, water, arms, and ammunition had been carved out within the mountains. With a nicely apocalyptic touch, Vosser also alleged that the Berchtesgaden district, some fifteen miles in depth and twenty-one in length, had been wired in such a way that the push of a single button would suffice to blow up the entire area.¹

Fantastic stuff, and likely not taken terribly seriously either by the casual reader or by any American official who happened to read the articles. Not, that is, until after the German counterattack in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, provided a shocking demonstration of their continued ability to spring nasty surprises. Yet another in a distressingly long line of intelligence oversights—stretching back through the failure to note the defensive potential of the hedgerow country in Normandy to the blunder at Kasserine Pass during the North African campaign—this latest fiasco put the Allied intelligence community on full alert. By its very nature an inexact science, intelligence assessment is a bit like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together without seeing the original picture. Forced to process a mixture of scattered and imperfect information, some rumor, some planted by the enemy, some accurate, analysts try to take the bits and pieces and create a credible assessment based on an appraisal of enemy intentions and capabilities. Stung by the Ardennes embarrassment and fearful that they had overlooked key evidence, American and British intelligence officials in early 1945 began reexamining information, focusing on three key areas: secret weapons, guerrilla activity, and prolonged resistance in an Alpenfestung (Alpine Fortress, or national redoubt).²

Of the three fears, the latter seemed most likely and threatening. Not only did the Alpine area of southern Germany, western Austria, and northern Italy, with its massive mountain ranges, narrow valleys, and winding roads, offer an ideal defensive terrain, but German forces in Italy had already demonstrated their skill at such fighting. Furthermore, the commander of the German forces in Italy that had so stymied and frustrated the Allies, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, had just been appointed commander of all German troops in the south. In addition, Allied advantages such as superior air power and ground mobility would to a considerable extent be neutralized by the poor weather and cramped mountainous terrain. Moreover, underground factories in southern Germany were known to be producing the latest miracle weapon, jet airplanes, which might operate from airfields hidden in the mountains. Finally, the human factor could not be ignored, especially since Hitler had already issued any number of stand and die orders. Headlines in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party newspaper, seemed to confirm such a determination to fight to the last, repeatedly proclaiming, We will never capitulate, and Relentless people’s war against all oppressors. Indeed, to Churchill and others, the sustained and fanatical German resistance around Budapest and Lake Balaton in Hungary seemed pointless except as a desperate attempt to keep the eastern approaches to an Alpenfestung open for retreating German troops.³ Worried about protracted resistance from a mountain stronghold, aware of the increasing imperatives of the Pacific war, and, not least, determined not to be caught off guard again, Allied intelligence officials set about assembling evidence to confirm their explanation for German actions.

THE ALPENFESTUNG AND REDOUBT HYSTERIA

Once begun, the search resulted in what appeared to be ample substantiation of the reality of an Alpenfestung. Ironically, the notion of a national redoubt, indeed even the name, stemmed from Swiss efforts between 1940 and 1942 to construct a mountain fortress that would serve as a deterrent to any possible German attack. By late 1943, with the tide of war turning against them, the Germans began exploring the possibility of utilizing existing World War I positions in the Dolomite Alps of Northern Italy as the basis for a defensive line running east from Bregenz on Lake Constance to Klagenfurt and then along the Yugoslav border toward Hungary. Since many of these fortifications had remained in relatively good condition, the Germans assumed they could build a strong position rather quickly. Thus, it was not until September of the following year that work began on improving the southern Alpine fortifications. That same September, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces High Command, or OKW) ordered a survey of the western and northern Alpine regions with an eye toward linking these with the southern defenses. An engineering staff under Brigadier General August Marcinkiewicz was established at Innsbruck for the purpose of mapping out future defensive positions, although no actual construction began.⁴

As the Germans began initial preparations for construction of an Alpine fortress, intelligence agents just across the border in Switzerland took note. In late July 1944, Swiss intelligence agent Hans Hausamann sent a report to his government indicating a growing concern that fanatical Nazis would hold out in the Alps until new secret weapons or a split in the Allied coalition produced a decisive turnaround in the war. Swiss intelligence also informed Allen Dulles, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) representative in Bern with whom it maintained regular contact, of the possibility of prolonged German resistance. Although himself somewhat skeptical, Dulles conceded that the Swiss took the possibility of a redoubt seriously, so he dutifully dispatched this information to Washington, where it likely would have been relegated to the wild rumor file except for two coincidental developments in September. First, one of the many American intelligence agents working in Switzerland sent a detailed report to Washington informing of powerful German defenses in the Alps. He spoke of monstrous fortifications with underground factories, of weapons and munitions depots, of secret airfields and stockpiles of supplies. Should the Germans successfully retreat into this fortress, the agent warned, the war could be extended by six to eight months and American forces would suffer more casualties than at Normandy. Of equal concern, he predicted that the Nazis could hold out for two years in the event this last bastion was not assaulted, a situation which might encourage widespread guerrilla activity throughout occupied Germany. Then, on September 22, the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS issued a scholarly analysis of southern Germany and its potential as a base for continuance of the war. Taken together, these reports nurtured a growing concern in Washington of the possibility of a last-ditch German defense in the south. After all, if the Swiss had created such a stronghold, it seemed only logical that the Germans could and would as well.⁵

Map 1: Alpenfestung

Once conceived, the fear of an Alpine fortress exercised a strange fascination on American officials determined to avoid any further shocks like the Ardennes offensive. The Germans had certainly undertaken some type of military activity in various areas of the Alps, the idea of a Götterdämmerung struggle in a mountain aerie conformed with Hitler’s personality and previous actions, and there seemed little reason to doubt that the SS would continue to obey orders and fight fanatically. Moreover, Bavaria had been the birthplace of Nazism, and many of its leaders, not least Hitler, displayed an almost mystical attraction to the mountains. Finally, because the redoubt lay in the future American zone of occupation, it would be solely an American problem if allowed to become operational. Unfortunately, despite the undeniable logic of American assumptions, much of the information on which their suppositions were based had been planted by SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Gontard, head of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, or SD) office in the border town of Bregenz. Having intercepted the OSS report to Washington warning of the Alpenfestung, Gontard could only marvel at what seemed to him boundless American gullibility. In late September, in fact, Gontard showed a copy of the report to Franz Hofer, the Gauleiter (party leader) of Tyrol, whom the OSS regarded as a radical Nazi fanatic, in order to demonstrate the ineptitude of the American intelligence service. In a grand irony, Hofer not only perceived how American fears could be exploited by propaganda, but also that the idea of a mountain fortress made sense from a military perspective.⁶

In early November, therefore, he dispatched a memorandum to Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party and secretary to Hitler, that detailed the need for immediate construction of a defense line in the Alps. What had not existed, what the Americans had conceptualized, Hofer now tried to make a reality. In addition to construction of fortifications, he proposed diverting enormous quantities of supplies, munitions, machinery, and military equipment to depots within the proposed fortress area, closing the region to all civilians and refugees, transferring thirty thousand Allied POWs to the Alps for use as hostages, and withdrawing the German army in Italy, still largely intact and undefeated, to the southern defense line. To Hofer’s great distress, however, no one in authority in Berlin showed interest in his suggestions, regarding them as overly pessimistic. Bormann, in fact, refused even to pass Hofer’s memorandum on to Hitler for fear, at a time when great hopes were vested in the Ardennes operation, of being characterized as a defeatist.⁷

Only Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels recognized the value of an Alpenfestung, and then merely to exploit redoubt hysteria among the Americans. Convening a secret meeting of German editors and journalists in early December 1944, Goebbels ensured the dissemination of rumors about a national redoubt by expressly forbidding any mention of such a thing in German newspapers. Then, in January 1945, he organized a special propaganda section to concoct stories about Alpine defensive positions. All the stories were to stress the same themes: impregnable fortifications, vast underground storehouses loaded with supplies, subterranean factories, and elite troops willing to fight fanatically to the last. In addition, Goebbels saw to it that rumors leaked not only to neutral governments but also to German troops. Because Allied intelligence drew on POW interrogations as well as reports from neutral countries, these actions ensured the further dissemination of apparent evidence of the existence of an Alpenfestung. Finally, Goebbels enlisted the aid of the SD to produce fake blueprints, reports on construction timetables, and plans for future transfers of troops and armaments into the redoubt.⁸

Aided by the efforts of Goebbels’s team, American journalists seized the tantalizing story. In late January, Austrian-born Erwin Lessner reported in a sensational article in Collier’s on an elaborate guerrilla warfare school being run near Berchtesgaden. There, elite SS and Hitler Youth members were allegedly being instructed in partisan warfare, with the goal of harassing the conquerors and terrorizing any Germans cooperating in the occupation. Lessner emphasized that these young guerrillas, given the name Werewolves, would stage lightning raids out of an Alpine fortress, trying to inflict as much damage and as many casualties as possible before retiring back to their mountain citadel. Although confident that this guerrilla war would ultimately fail, Lessner warned that it could nonetheless cause grave difficulties if not taken seriously by the Allies. After all, he pointed out, the Nazis had the advantage of having studied all of the resistance movements that had opposed their rule, and so had a clear understanding of how to conduct an effective underground war. In Lessner’s assessment, the Nazis meant guerrilla war to be another Vweapon, which, after all, in German stood for Vergeltung (revenge, retaliation). The goal, then, was not victory as much as it was vengeance.⁹

A few days later the Swiss added fuel to the smoldering fire. The Zurich newspaper Weltwoche, under the headline Festung Berchtesgaden, reported on February 2 that reliable reports out of Germany contained technical details of the construction of a Berchtesgaden redoubt position with the Obersalzburg as the nerve center. As the nearest neighbors to Germany, the Swiss had instant credibility, which was reinforced in the article by the accumulation of detail about the alleged mountain fortress. Running along the rugged crest of the mountains, the defensive system,

with its installations of machine gun nests, anti-aircraft positions, radio transmitters, and secure bunkers at the passes provide evidence that the romantic dream [of sustained resistance] is taken seriously and that good German thoroughness is once again being directed at a fantastic goal…. In the heights around the Königssee, in the old salt mines in the area, in hollowed out mountains and along valley roads, little by little massive depots of war material, munitions, repair and maintenance shops are being established. Industrial facilities to produce war material are being built there. Airplane factories for jet fighters are being erected, huge fuel depots put in place…. Underground airfields and hangers stand ready…. Grain and potato supplies have been gathered.

The fortress Berchtesgaden, the article emphasized, is no legend, with its political purpose more important than its military significance. It was, the author declared, intended to keep alive a bacterial culture of National Socialist ideology and strength until the day when a renewed Nazism would again seize power.¹⁰

Little over a week after the Weltwoche article, a long piece in the New York Times Magazine, Last Fortress of the Nazis, seemingly confirmed the Swiss assertion. The author, Victor Schiff, almost certainly had read the Swiss article, for much of his detail mirrored the information contained in the Zurich newspaper. Schiff asserted that the Nazis, having nothing to lose, would fight bitterly to the last in the hope of a reversal of fortune, and that the fight would be carried on by Hitler’s fanatical elite, the SS. He went on alarmingly:

It is noteworthy that since the beginning of the Russian offensive very little has been heard of the SS troops on the Eastern Front…. It looks as if the Wehrmacht and Volkssturm are being deliberately sacrificed in rear-guard actions…. SS formations are likely to retreat swiftly southward to a region already selected as the last theater of operations in Europe…. It will stretch from the eastern tip of Lake Constance to the approaches of Graz in Styria …, [with] an approximate length of 280 miles and an average width of 100 miles, and a total area slightly larger than Switzerland…. It would be comparatively easy to defend this fortress for a very long time with some twenty divisions … behind the formidable barrier of the gigantic chain of central and eastern Alps…. The few gaps in the valleys … can be sealed with more fortifications and pill-boxes dug in the rocks, and [there is] little doubt that the Todt Organization is already being used to the limit for that purpose…. We can assume that the Nazi High Command has started hoarding reserves of arms, munitions, oil, food, and textiles in a series of underground depots within the Alpine quadrangle.

Pointing to the difficulty posed by such an Alpine fortress, Schiff observed, If they succeeded in holding out till the autumn of 1945, operations would have to come to a standstill till the spring of 1946 … [because of] the impossibility of any real warfare in such regions during the winter. Ending his gloomy assessment, Schiff raised the specter of a monstrous blackmail, noting, "Since D-Day all the main political hostages from Allied countries have been moved by the Gestapo [German secret police] from various parts of the Reich into this Alps quadrangle."¹¹

Nor could this article be dismissed as wild speculation, for Dr. Paul Schmidt, spokesman of the German Foreign Office, gave a speech on February 13 to foreign correspondents in which he boasted, Millions of us will wage guerrilla warfare; every German before he dies will try to take five or ten enemies with him to the grave. As another journalist, Curt Riess, argued, such talk played to the element of Todesverlangen (longing for death) allegedly rampant in German culture. Just as Wagner portrayed the world’s end as a Twilight of the Gods, so Hitler and Goebbels wanted their own Götterdämmerung and hoped to convince average Germans that their death was a fate full of meaning. By the end of the month, even the Soviets had gotten in on the action, warning in Pravda that the Nazis had made complete preparations for setting up underground terrorist organizations for the purpose of sabotage and revenge.¹²

Adding weight to these assertions, Dulles communicated his growing concern to Washington, stressing on January 22 that The information we get here locally seems to tend more and more to the theory of a Nazi withdrawal into the Austrian and Bavarian Alps, with the idea of making a last stand there. A few weeks later, in fact, Dulles raised the possibility of not one, but several redoubts, asserting, When organized German military resistance collapses, there will probably be more than one ‘reduit’ or inner fortress of Nazi resistance…. It seems generally accepted now that a delayed defense fortress will lie in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps. Swiss sources have information which they consider reliable that substantial amounts of foodstuffs being [sic] collected here, and that some underground factories are being prepared to supply arms for mountain warfare. The problem, Dulles admitted, was that it is impossible to put your finger on the particular area where the foodstuffs are being collected, or where these underground factories are being prepared. He then closed his dispatch with a horror scenario outlined by the National Zeitung of Basle: The most important centers of resistance … are to be in Thueringen, south of Stuttgart, and in Middle Bavaria and Austria. There is plenty of protection there by mountains and hills, and many fortifications have been constructed. There is already an armament industry in operation…. The idea of [guerrilla warfare] existed in 1918…. Similar plans are now to be carried into effect by the Nazis, with their habitual thoroughness, and aided by their experiences with the resistance movements in occupied countries…. There are special schools for recruits … [and] huge underground ammunition plants and tremendous stores of ammunition and food.¹³

As influential journalists and intelligence operatives supplied seemingly detailed and knowledgeable accounts of the likelihood of endless conflict in a mountain bastion, higher-ranking Allied intelligence officials too began to fall under its apocalyptic spell. The fear that thousands of GIs would be killed in subduing an Alpine fortress was a nightmare that had to be taken seriously. Increasingly, then, all military measures of the Germans came to be viewed through the lens of the apparent reality of an Alpenfestung. The continued fighting in Hungary now seemed to make sense only in relation to buying time for an occupation of the redoubt. In addition, the numerous trains heading to the south (most, ironically, carrying looted art treasures to safety) were interpreted as military supplies heading to the fortress area. Scattered rumors gleaned from POW interrogations that referred to mysterious SS movements, bombproof buildings in mountain regions that would serve as military headquarters for a guerrilla war, and underground production facilities all added to the emerging picture of a national redoubt. Even the missing SS divisions added to the weight of evidence pointing to a last-ditch resistence, since Allied intelligence had also noticed an absence of several key SS units before the Ardennes offensive. Not enough weight is given the many reports of the probable Nazi last stand in the Bavarian Alps, concluded a counterintelligence assessment issued by the War Department on February 12. The Nazi myth which is important … [to] men like Hitler requires a Götterdämmerung. In closing, the memo urged that American commanders down to the corps level be alerted to the danger. A month later, Dulles seconded this contention, noting that present [German] military strategy seems to be built around the idea of a reduit.¹⁴

Not to be outdone, the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS issued a long report on February 22 summarizing much of the accumulating evidence from POW interrogations regarding an Alpine redoubt. Taking as a given the existence of an inner bastion, the OSS stressed that it was an ideal gathering point for all retreating German forces. Psychological factors also pointed toward a drawn-out resistance. Comprising as it does the Obersalzburg, the holy of holies among Nazi sanctuaries, the authors emphasized, the [Alpine] region has a romantic appeal to potential last ditch heroes. The report then detailed the myriad activities throughout the region that supported the notion of an Alpenfestung: movement of SS troops and forced laborers, construction of fortifications, road and rail improvements, construction of barracks, warehouses, and weapons depots, installation of communication facilities, and excavation of tunnels. Taken together with evidence that the greatest efforts were in the Berchtesgaden area, the OSS could only conclude that the Nazis were concentrating their last resources for a defense of a national redoubt. Continued reports from prisoner interrogations over the next few weeks seemingly confirmed this assessment, as POWs spoke of underground barracks and armaments factories, movements of SS troops, removal of civilians from specific areas, and preparation of bridges and tunnels for demolition. Finally, Allied intelligence took particular note of the activities of Organization Todt, which had specialized in erecting defensive fortifications throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. As such, they had developed a system of standardized fabrication that allowed for the rapid construction of various types of reinforced concrete structures. Moreover, sufficient labor existed in the form of forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners to expedite any last-minute construction orders.¹⁵

Adding to the growing Allied fear was a mid-February report obtained by an OSS agent from neutral military attachés in Berlin that warned that the Nazis were preparing to conduct a bitter struggle from an Alpenfestung. Military strong points are connected with each other by underground railroads, asserted the attachés. They have sufficient supplies for many months, the best weapons, and almost the entire German stockpile of poison gas. All people engaged in the construction of these secret facilities are to be killed, including any remaining civilians, at the beginning of the battle. Since this report emanated from the heart of the crumbling Nazi empire, the OSS believed it could not be discounted, despite its sensationalist message and failure to address actual military possibilities. Nor could its claims of vast underground works be easily dismissed, for the Allies knew that the Germans had already moved many armaments factories into subterranean locations, which remained both undetected and undisturbed by Allied bombing.¹⁶

Peering into the unknown, worried about the possibility of yet another German surprise, Allied leaders increasingly agreed that the Alpenfestung was likely a reality. Allen Dulles noted in mid-and late March the likelihood that the fierce German resistance in the Ruhr and Berlin was aimed at gaining time to gather forces in the redoubt. He then stressed, [Nazi leaders] now feel themselves as beyond the law…. We know that no fighters are more dangerous than those who fight with the energy of despair. They shrink from nothing …, for they have nothing more to lose. According to Major General Kenneth Strong, the head of intelligence at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), by March 1945 his office was receiving a continuous flow of reports that the Nazis intended to stage a final prolonged resistance from a national redoubt. Strong admitted that the reports of deep dugouts, secret hiding-places, underground factories, and bombproof headquarters were confusing and unconvincing. No single piece of information could be confirmed. An Alpine stronghold might not be there, he concluded, "but … we nevertheless had to take steps to prevent it from being established. After the Ardennes,